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What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

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Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#31

Post by alasdair_ »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #28
gohrt wrote: post #10

Why do players think it's acceptable to have an "economy" for trading virtual gamepieces? Why don't they walk away and play game/culture that charges a flat fee or a time/usage-based subscription?

Basically, because Wizards of the Coast came up with the core concepts of the pay-to-win money treadmill game 15 years before the App Store launched--low cost to start playing, psychological impetus to spend more money on a regular basis, appealing to kids and teens with lots of free time and a willingness to badger their parents for money, social enough that players will stay in the game for years because all their…

>pay-to-win money treadmill game

Money isn't really an object at any kind of serious tournament - everyone has/ can borrow all the cards they need to play.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#32

Post by alasdair_ »

The main reason the MTGO economy is broken is simple: MTGO is incredibly shoddily designed and coded. It crashes all the time and has so many memory leaks they still plague users ten years after it was built.

All of the issues lead to a LOT of refunds, essentially doubling the product (tickets and cards) in circulation.

Recently, the game moved over to "4.0" which was even worse than 3.0 which has, in part, exacerbated the problem.

This actually has a knock on effect on the paper magic markets where card redemption (can turn digital cards into paper cards) has a big impact on prices. There are countless articles on MTGPrice.com about this.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#33

Post by PhasmaFelis »

alasdair_ wrote: post #31
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, because Wizards of the Coast came up with the core concepts of the pay-to-win money treadmill game 15 years before the App Store launched--low cost to start playing, psychological impetus to spend more money on a regular basis, appealing to kids and teens with lots of free time and a willingness to badger their parents for money, social enough that players will stay in the game for years because all their…

>pay-to-win money treadmill game Money isn't really an object at any kind of serious tournament - everyone has/ can borrow all the cards they need to play.

Sure, but you're not going to tournaments unless you're already a serious player, and if you're a serious player you're going to be buying new cards on the regular. The tournaments and such are really just icing, from WotC's perspective.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#35

Post by jvdh »

The article is using 'fancy' graphs, economic 101 and a long analysis to hide the fact that he is basing most of his theory on gut feeling. There are several points at which he states this himself, but fails to mention that these become crucial to the whole analysis.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#36

Post by AcerbicZero »

spiritplumber wrote: post #24
carapace wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When all my friends got into MtG back in high school I said, "I'll play but I'm going to make my own cards. I don't want to buy them from the store." But no one would go for it. I never understood. I used to say, "But there are no actual wizards at Wizards of the Coast."

Yeah, that was a thing for us too circa 1996. It ended with there being two groups of players: "Poor" players that printed cards and had access to the entire card catalog and could build insane cheese, and "rich" players who didn't and didn't. Then there were the my-dad-owns-a-textile-mill types who would learn a cheese from the print-it-yourselfers, spend millions of lire on cards, and replicate the cheese with the…

It seems making it "pay a lot to win" isn't that much better than straight pay-to-win. I never understood how these players could tolerate broken mechanics in such an expensive game.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#37

Post by r721 »

cdr wrote: post #30
nosuchthing wrote: post #16

The whole concept of collectable cards feels like a scam, right alongside the freemium pay-for-virtual-clothing hustle.

You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment. Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resa…

Did you see this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/37tqqa/how_sellin... ?

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#38

Post by hansjorg »

cdr wrote: post #29
hansjorg wrote: post #14

Planet Money on NPR did a piece recently on how WotC avoided some of these issues and made the card game such a success twenty plus years ago. There's also some interesting anecdotes regarding the Hasbro buy out. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/03/11/392381112/episo...

That was not well researched though, if at all - it's by complete outsiders with little actual knowledge of what happened. Even the person they talk to (Skaff Elias IIRC) gives them a dubious offhand anecdote. It's a Malcolm Gladwell level story.

The stories about the Hasbro buyout I was thinking of were actually from Peter Adkison's blog, read that just after hearing the NPR piece and got them mixed up:

http://www.peteradkison.com/blog-entry-3-wizards-of-the-coas...

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#39

Post by cdr »

r721 wrote: post #37
cdr wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment. Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resa…

Did you see this link: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/37tqqa/how_sellin... ?

That was an entirely bizarre incident with entirely unique circumstances. Nothing similar has ever happened before, or may ever happen again once the troll is shot down in court.

Among other things it involves someone who's made 2,200 sales on a marketplace and was dabbling in straight up speculation.

Re: What Broke the Magic Online Economy?

#40

Post by nosuchthing »

cdr wrote: post #30
nosuchthing wrote: post #16

The whole concept of collectable cards feels like a scam, right alongside the freemium pay-for-virtual-clothing hustle.

You seem to be overlooking a huge thing - collectibles have an (above-the-board) resale value. While perhaps the market crashes someday, for 25 years Magic cards have done nothing but go up in value. I'm personally up tens of thousands of dollars lifetime from paper Magic, and some thousands from dabbling in digital. And all of it was purchased for play, not investment. Non-collectible virtual goods have dubious resa…

Artificial scarcity is the scam. You have pieces of mass produced paper with ink.
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